Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 71. Sunrise is 6:27 and sunset is 7:16, for 12 hours, 49 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 4:30 PM. Whitewater’s Planning and Architectural Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1966, the landmark science fiction television series Star Trek premieres with its first-aired episode, “The Man Trap.”
A fitting headline describes the story ahead. So it is with U.S. could tumble into recession before seeing Trump’s promised golden age:
Administration officials also have said they expect provisions in Trump’s signature legislation, which he dubbed “the One Big Beautiful Bill,” to encourage greater business investment. In July, Bessent promised Fox that the measure “will set off growth like we have never seen before.”
Some Wall Street banks forecast a more muted performance, at least in the short term. Morgan Stanley pegs economic growth in the current quarter at 1.5 percent.
Today’s labor market weakness can be traced to several Trump policies, economists said. On-again, off-again tariff announcements over the past several months have made it difficult for businesses to plan new investments or to hire.
Trump has imposed the highest tariffs since the 1930s in a bid to encourage domestic manufacturing. Yet factory employment has dropped by 41,000 since February. Other trade-related sectors, including mining, wholesalers and oil and gas extraction, also have seen payrolls shrink in recent months. And the boom in factory construction that began under President Joe Biden ended after Trump eliminated many of the government subsidies that encouraged such projects.
“We aren’t even seeing the beginnings of a tariff-related recovery in manufacturing. You don’t expect to see it overnight. But it’s going in the wrong direction,” said economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington.
The president’s crackdown on illegal immigration, including workplace raids like the one at a Hyundai plant in Georgia on Friday, is driving down the availability of foreign-born workers, which also weighs on hiring. Over the first six months of the year, the nation’s foreign-born population fell by more than 1 million, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump’s tougher immigration policy, coupled with the effects of societal aging, are reducing potential monthly job growth by more than 100,000 hires, according to Barclays.
See David J. Lynch, The U.S. could tumble into recession before seeing Trump’s promised golden age (‘The U.S. economy is at risk of entering a recession before President Trump’s promised golden age, with weak job growth and high inflation blamed on his policies’), Washington Post, September 8, 2025.
Large numbers of immigrants have left the workforce this year, but their departure has done nothing to boost native-born employment:
The Trump administration weathered another disappointing U.S. jobs report when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on September 5, 2025, that total nonfarm payroll employment rose by only 22,000 in August. The total seasonally adjusted labor force has increased by only 34,000 since January 2025 and has decreased by 357,000 since its peak in April 2025.
“The loss of immigrant workers and immigrant consumers is a major cause of slow job growth,” said labor economist Mark Regets, a senior fellow at the National Foundation for American Policy, in an interview. “Immigrants both create demand for the goods and services produced by U.S.-born workers and work alongside them in ways that increase productivity for both groups.”
See Stewart Anderson, Immigration Has Declined, But No Evidence U.S. Workers Are Better Off, Forbes, September 7, 2025.
Far-right populism has no sound economic theory, certainly not a theory of mutually supporting, synergistic growth. (The populists aren’t free-market types.) Populism has, in economics and culture, only a zero-sum theory of someone’s loss as someone else’s gain. And so, and so, they erroneously believe that deportations, for example, would leave more for everyone else.
It hasn’t and it won’t work that way. It’s worth noting, however, that populist claims of an economic gain were, at bottom, only secondary to them in any event.
It’s a cultural and political retribution that they want. They’ll inflict (and endure) widespread economic pain for their primary cultural goals.
Seoul promises to help hundreds of Korean workers arrested in US in Ice raid: